Growing uncertainty about Global Warming cause

Published 6:00 pm, Friday, February 12, 2010

Hearst News Service - When the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season produced seven major storms, alarmists cited the heightened activity as irrefutable meteorological evidence of the immediate threat to humanity posed by man-made global warming.

"Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote on the Huffington Post. "Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

When the 2010 winter season brought an arctic freeze to Europe that broke three-decade-old records, snowstorms to China that broke six-decade-old records, a cold blast that set record low temperatures across a broad swath of the Southern United States and Snowmageddon I and Snowmageddon II to the East Coast, it was evidence of … nothing much.

"It's part of natural variability," Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research told the Associated Press in January. With global warming, he said, "We'll still have record cold temperatures."

You see how this works. A season of destructive hurricanes in the Western Atlantic — the obvious result of mankind's insatiable addiction to CO2-producing fossil fuels. A global season of glacial cold — that's just natural variability. The former is evidence of climate change. The latter is simply weather.

Despite the creative use of language and the hocus pocus explanations — perhaps because of them — public doubt about global warming is increasing. The number of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has dropped to 57 percent, down 14 points since 2008, according to a survey conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities. A Pew poll finds Americans rank global warming dead last among 21 priorities.

That's a problem, because global warming is real. Global average temperatures have been rising more or less steadily for the past 150 years. If that trend continues, the long-term consequences for the human condition could be disastrous, especially in poor areas of the Earth.

While the phenomenon of global warming isn't — or shouldn't be — in doubt, its causes are far from certain. Our planet's climate has gone through countless warming and cooling cycles, influenced by countless variables: sun spot activity, Earth's wobbling axis, volcanic eruptions and naturally occurring greenhouse gases, among them.

Yet climate change alarmists believe with a religious-like fervor that the current warming trend is primarily or entirely the result of human activity. And a central tenet of global warmism is the ardent belief that a man-made apocalypse is at hand, necessitating a new carbon-free dispensation.

The sacred texts of this belief system, the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are falling apart under scrutiny. While American media have largely ignored Climategate and subsequent IPCC scandals, British media have been leading the way in uncovering a global warmist blizzard of misinformation about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035, ice rapidly melting from the world's mountains, and global warming accelerating the demise of Amazonian rainforests, worsening declines in North African crop production and increasing the severity of natural disasters.

Sound national security and economic reasons exist for the United States to lessen its dependence on imported fossil fuels and develop domestic clean energy sources. But when the so-called experts subvert their work and stoke fears in pursuit of a radical, costly anti-carbon agenda, it's no wonder that uncertainty about global warming is growing. If there's to be any hope of addressing the real dangers of global warming, climate scientists will need to purge their pronouncements of the zealotry that is discrediting their work.